In addition to this Secret Santa blog, I also run ChellyWood.com, which offers free, printable sewing patterns for doll clothes and doll accessories. This year, for the holidays, ChellyWood.com is offering this free pattern for a miniature Christmas stocking. So I thought, “Hey! I should share this with my Secret Santa followers too!”

This sewing tutorial shows you exactly how to make the little holiday stockings. Even if you don’t sew, this is an easy project to make. You could probably even use felt and hot glue. (But my tutorial shows you how to make them with a needle and thread.)

What do teachers spend their weekends, evenings, and vacations doing? Grading papers.

The most useful gift you can give a teacher is TIME, because we never seem to have enough of it. But how can you help a teacher grade all those papers without letting the cat out of the bag?

Give your secret teacher pal rubber stamps. Let’s face it, sometimes those papers pile up, and you can’t find enough time to grade all of them. When that end-of-your-rope moment occurs, what you need is a quick easy way to say, “CHECK!”–I graded it.

Here’s a set of Good Job! stamps, selling for $4.00 for four wood-based stamps, on Amazon.

Once you’ve bought the rubber stamps, you’ll also want to buy your teacher pal some ink. Here’s a set with three different colors for $5.85.

There are lots of ways to divvy out your stamps. Give them, one at a time, in a gift bag with other things like candy and pencils. Or wrap each one in a little box with a ribbon and give the stamps as individual gifts. If you buy a set of 10 stamps, you could divide them up and give your secret pal one stamp per gift day, spreading out a $20.00 set so that they become ten, $2.00 gifts.

One last thing: although it’s a little more spendy, here’s a website that offers educational self-inking stamps, youth-group-themed stamps, business stamps, and more. You can have a self-inking stamp customized with your teacher friend’s name on it (great for marking his/her classroom library’s books and other stuff) for $13.95. Imagine giving your secret pal teacher friend a self-inking stamp that says, “This book belongs to Mr. Garcia”. How cool is that? 🙂

The FREE printable no-sew ornament pattern is available at: https://chellywood.com/2018/11/15/crafty-hanukkah-or-christmas-diy-tutorial-w-free-pattern-chellywood-com-3/

You can download the pattern and cut out a bunch of fabric squares. As you see in the video, you would use straight pins to poke the squares into a Styrofoam ball. Then just turn each square into triangles (shown in the video) and pin them down in layers.

It’s a fairly simple project to make, and what secret Santa would love to get one of these in their stocking?

It’s pretty straightforward. A kite is a super-fun item to play around with on the beach, down at the lake, or even in your own backyard.

You don’t have to be a kid to enjoy playing with a kite. Unwrapping one from its packaging brings out the inner child in all of us!

So consider giving your Secret Pal a kite for his/her July or August gift. They’re available at Walgreens, Walmart, and many toy stores.

Please note that although my posts only happen once a month most of the year, these posts occur weekly during the holidays, when it’s “Secret Santa” season, so it’s a good idea to bookmark this website for later reference.

For my 4th of July Secret Pal gift idea, I’d like to suggest putting together all the fixin’s for your secret pal to make himself/herself some home-made lemonade. Search for a recipe online and print it out. Also place the following goodies in one of those summer jars you see on sale at every store in town:

A dozen fresh lemons

A bag of C&H pure cane sugar

A wooden spoon

A juice squeezer

Tie a big yellow ribbon around the jar, and you’ve got a 4th of July gift for your Secret Pal!